Muslim Body Research Articles

BEYOND VEILS: AN IPA STUDY OF FILIPINO MUSLIM WOMEN’S BODY NARRATIVES

Guided by Feminist Standpoint Theory and Intersectionality, this study is dedicated to unveiling the body narratives of Filipino Muslim women or 'Muslimahs' and creates a space for a critical reflection on societal constructs that shape the perception of their bodies. Through the draw-talk process, participants were encouraged to visually and verbally articulate their perceptions of the female Muslim body according to religious teachings and cultural ideologies, as well as their contemporary interpretations and experiences - Bridging the gap between traditional Islamic teachings, cultural beliefs, and contemporary experiences of Muslimahs. Employing Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the research unveils seven themes: 'A Muslimah is Covered,' 'A Muslimah is Protected and Esteemed,' 'A Muslimah is Modest and Clean,' 'A Muslimah is Nurturing,' 'Expressing Individuality,' 'Challenges of Being a Minority,' and 'Not Oppressed, but Actually Empowered.' The first four themes address traditional narratives rooted in cultural and religious norms, emphasizing modesty, protection, and nurturing roles within the Muslim community. The subsequent three themes delve into contemporary experiences, including the expression of individuality, challenges faced by religious and cultural minorities, and assertions of empowerment and freedom derived from faith. This study opens opportunities for a broader discourse on body construct, identity, and tradition-modernity interactions, standing against stereotypes and calling for a more inclusive and accepting society. It challenges preconceived notions and recognizes the diverse agency and autonomy of Muslimahs in shaping their narratives.

Ambivalent Subjects: The Ottoman State and Its Non-Sunni Muslim Population. Introduction to the Special Issue

ABSTRACT This thematic issue brings together articles on non-Sunni Muslim communities in the Ottoman Empire between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on case studies from Bayrami-Melami, Kızılbaş, Nusayri and Twelver Shii contexts, the issue investigates the different modes in which the Ottoman state and these parts of its population encountered and perceived each other. At times severely persecuting them, the state also applied other, more accommodative measures towards these groups, which Sharia-minded Muslims may regard as ‘heretics’. This thematic issue explores the dynamics of these different relations between the state and these ambivalent subjects. Focusing on specific constellations of time and place and using a variety of sources from both local and central administration archives, the articles explore the historical context of the diverse policies of persecution and accommodation, collaboration and resistance that were implemented. The overall argument is for a perspective that historicizes Ottoman politics of difference in order to go beyond essentialist notions of timeless ‘heretics’ on the one hand and a seemingly monolithic, Sunni Muslim body politic on the other.

Removal of Infected Muslim Body Covid-1 According to MUI Fatwa No. 18 Years 2020

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, infected individuals have spread far and fatally affected a significant number of people. Indonesia is fearful and nervous about getting COVID-19. Even when COVID-19 patients have passed away, the virus can still spread to others who come into contact with a dead body. The qualitative, statutory, and normative research approach used to write this thesis is library research (library research) based on secondary sources. A qualitative investigation was carried out on the numerous documentary studies that have been done, which were done by looking through and perusing a variety of literature. Qualitative data is descriptive in nature, meaning it is gathered using words rather than statistics. The study's findings indicate that managing Muslim bodies infected with Covid-19 differs from handling corpses in general and calls for specific handling in accordance with MUI fatwa no. 18 of 2020 for managing the bodies of Muslims infected with Covid-19, in order to prevent infection of the general public and law enforcement personnel performing their duties.

How organisations regulate Muslim body practices: a comparison of schools, hospitals, and swimming pools

In a comparison of three human service organisations in which the human body plays a key role, we examine how organisations regulate religious body practices. We concentrate on Muslim norms of dressing and undressing as a potential focal point of cultural and religious diversity. Inspired by Ray’s (2019) idea of racialized organizations, we assume that state-run organizations in Germany are characterized by a strong commitment to religious tolerance and non-discrimination but also marked by anti-Muslim sentiment prevalent among the German population. Our study looks for mechanism that explain how Human Service Organizations accommodate Muslim body practices. It draws on qualitative empirical data collected in state-run hospitals, schools and swimming pools in Germany. Our analyses show that the organizations draw on formal and informal rules at the organizational level to accommodate Islam. We identify five general organizational mechanisms that may hinder Muslim accommodation in human service organizations. In particular, we see a risk of decoupling between the expectation of religious tolerance and processes that lead to informal discrimination, driven mainly by the difficulty of controlling group dynamics among users.

DIALEKTIKA FILSAFAT DALAM SEJARAH ISLAM: PEMIKIRAN DAN PROBLEMATIKANYA

Islamic philosophy has a long history of problems, both within and outside the Muslim body. Philosophy that originated in Greece has certainly given rise to judgment, condemnation, and even rejection from some Islamic circles. Al-Ghazālī (1058-1111 AD) with his book Tahāfut al-Falāsifah, which later made the stigma about philosophy worse and even led to his death, and which later appeared on the counter of an Ibn Rusyd with his book Tahafut At-Tahafut. This article highlights the thinking of Muslim philosophers and scholars in response to philosophy and mentions the reasons behind it, which will then be packaged in the form of the ups and downs of the development of Islamic philosophy. This article will also help decipher the origins of philosophy, its position in the tradition of thinking in Islam, and philosophy as a fusion between revelation and reason. This article's discussion uses a descriptive-analytical method that focuses on history. The results of this study can help recognize the role and position of philosophy in the intellectual history of Islam, which is then able to determine attitudes and views towards philosophy.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Material Islam

Anna Bigelow and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri introduce this special issue of MAVCOR Journal devoted to Material Islam. It explores devotional objects, the Islamic sensorium, the book as a material object, the Muslim body, and the various roles of the mosque as a social, political, and spiritual space.

Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment

Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment

I (Don’t) See You: Absence, Omissions, and Spectrality in the Works of Ishtiyaq Shukri

This paper studies the representation of the Muslim body (within the context of the War on Terror) as an instance of disembodied subjectivity that haunts through the remnants of its presence, via a close textual analysis of Ishtiyaq Shukri’s novels The Silent Minaret (2005) and I See You (2014). The paper examines the corporeal absence within the said texts as a template for understanding the modus operandi of the necropolitical regime and the extremities of state violence it implies. It explores the implications of spectrality within texts saturated by instances of taxonomical categorisations of the body and examines spectrality alongside the implications of absences and omissions in order to reveal how the three interact and inform each other. Conceptualising spectrality as the dominant mode of writing for post-9/11 novels, the paper engages with Derrida’s work on deferred mourning in relation to spectres, offering a new paradigm for an understanding of the post-9/11 Muslim experience.

Women-only swimming as a space of belonging

ABSTRACT The female Muslim body has come under close political and public scrutiny in many Western societies. Within sport, too, Muslim women’s dress and practices have become topics of discussion. For example, gender-segregated swimming sessions catering for Muslim women have caused disputes in several European countries, including Denmark. Nevertheless, the perspectives of participants are absent in such discussions and research about the significance of sports and physical activity for minority-ethnic groups is sparse. The aim of this article is to explore the meanings Danish Muslim women ascribe to their participation in a gender-segregated swimming space. Drawing on transnational feminism that foregrounds the voices of ‘othered’ women, this article presents the results of a study, in which we used participant observation and interviews with club officials and 14 Muslim women. The participants connected swimming with well-being and self-care and portrayed women-only swimming as a space of belonging, where they felt comfortable and safe and were not only protected from the male but also the ‘white’ gaze that they encountered in other situations, such as when wearing a burkini on the beach. Consequently, contestations of belonging ‘outside’ gave particular value to the women-only swimming pool as a space free from such contestations. This finding demonstrates how Muslim women’s experiences with sport and physical activity are shaped by current public and political discourses on immigration and integration in Western societies.

Domesticating the Body of the Exotic Other: The Multisensory Use of a Sixteenth-century Brass Candlestick

Abstract Through the medium of a brass candlestick made in a sixteenth-century German foundry, I discuss the Christian European household’s sensory engagement and spatial control of the Muslim body. I argue that the Europeans’ sensory experience of the turbaned candlestick reflects and reinforces their conceptualization of Islamic culture, which is a blend of fear and fascination. The turbaned candlestick allows us to explore issues rarely discussed in the study of metalwork and the European imagery of ‘the East’. The shape and scale of the candlestick suggest that it could have been treated both as a statuette and as a piece of furniture. The inanimate candlestick would have felt livelier when the user touched its body and felt heat, flame, light and smoke from the candlestick. My analysis of the candlestick suggests that it might have been experienced through a comprehensive play of senses.

The Muslim: Islamophobia as disembodiment

ABSTRACT Islamophobia is not just a fear of people ascribing to the religion of Islam, if that was the case simple religious conversions would erase hatred. In the world of surging Alt-Right movements, Islamophobia embodies racism, anti-migrant xenophobia, and orientalism. This article explores Alt-Right groups in the US and Europe, traces their ideological gurus, deconstructs political speeches, reports of rightwing think tanks to understand how Islamophobia is a process of disembodiment. Inspired by Bourdieu’s habitus, and feminist work on embodiment/disembodiment, this article argues that the Muslim narrative thoroughly disembodies the Muslim body. Disembodiment is annihilation before corporeal death ensues, the Muslim does not get to mark her corporeal and intellectual existence. Disembodiment nullifies the Muslim’s life, she is only valuable in death, because disembodiment reclaims her death as a vanquished terrorist, as a murdered jihadi, or a bombed city where weapons of mass destruction or uranium may have existed.

‘Our doors are open, there's nothing to hide: Muslim Transparency in Securitized Britain’

A wide range of scholarship has noted the prevalence of discourses that construct British Muslims as suspicious, unfathomable threats – an “enemy within” the national body politic. This essay, based on ethnographic research among mosques in the United Kingdom, argues that Muslims volunteering at open days and other public outreach events respond to this suspicion through enacting vulnerability and openness to scrutiny. Through public performances of transparency, they presented themselves as unguarded and open to external examination. This essay explores how these performances of transparency take place, drawing on interviews with individuals involved in public events, participant observation and media discourse analysis. I argue these performances foreground the visibly Muslim body as unthreatening, searchable and with “nothing to hide”. Performers express their sense that these acts of openness offer the ability to present an alternative discourse about British Muslims. However, Muslim performances of transparency may do more to reify ideological categories of “good” and “bad” Muslims than they do to destabilize constructions of Muslims as threatening.

The accommodation of Muslim body practices in German public swimming pools

ABSTRACT The renegotiation of secularity for Muslims has reached sports facilities such as swimming pools, where the human body is central and an element of cross-cultural contestation. The present study identifies factors that could explain intra-organizational variations in religious accommodation. Data from a survey of geo-located swimming pools in Germany (n = 339) shows that conflict among users becomes more likely if the variation in body practices, the share of right-wing populist votes and the population of immigrant background increases. On the organizational level, we find that 75 per cent of the pools in our sample allow the burqini while only 10 per cent provide separate swimming hours for women. Higher shares of right-wing populist (and to a lesser extent of conservative) votes in the organization’s environment correlate with a higher likelihood of burqini bans. Our findings suggest that the relationship between organizational change and citizens’ attitudes is loose at best.

Livestreaming the ‘wretched of the Earth’: The Christchurch massacre and the ‘death-bound subject’

The livestreaming of terror, its co-production through live consumption and the massacre of lives as ‘entertainment’ propelled us into another long abyss of ethical challenges in the case of the xenophobic terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Livestreaming, as part of the convergence of technologies, enables narration in ‘real’ time, dragging us into a new ‘banalisation of evil’ where terror and torture can be co-produced by inviting audiences to consume through the vantage point of the perpetrator. This article examines the Muslim ‘body’ through JanMohamed’s notion of the ‘death-bound subject’ where the continual threat of death foreshadows the Muslim body, imbricating it within a political and ideological archaeology wherein both its possibility of death and the performance of death enter into a realm of theatrics of production incumbent upon invoking new moralities around consumption and its residues as a screen image. The ‘wretched of the Earth’ and their residues as immaterial matter online as the ‘wretched of the screen’ connote a new architecture of violence conjoining the temporalities of liveness with the sharing features of ‘semiotic capitalism’.

The Racialization of the Muslim Body and Space in Hollywood

Using 11 high-grossing post-9/11 Hollywood films on terrorism and the Middle East, the author analyzes how films racialize Muslim identities in service to Islamophobia. This research brings together racialization theory with analysis of political ideologies that illustrate visualized racialized meanings on Muslim identities. The racialized portrayals of Muslim bodies inscribed in the political rhetoric of the War on Terror follow a systemic process of ethnoracial cultural othering that objectifies, vilifies, and dehumanizes Muslim identities. The author demonstrates how films engage in the political processes of racial construction of Muslim identities by criminalizing their gendered identity, dehumanizing their body, and devaluing their territorial and physical space in the context of the War on Terror.

The visuality of terror: gender, sex and desire in war

ABSTRACTThe constitutive relation between visuality and terror has been underscored in the early twenty-first century, from the broadcast of the 9/11 attacks to the front page coverage of the invasion of Afghanistan, from the prime time bombing of Bagdad to the Abu Ghraib photographs. However, the global transmission of these images rendered invisible this mutuality by rupturing the link between the political and the cultural, the historical and the contemporary, the individual and the social, disciplining the viewing subject into the discourse of terror.This paper examines the visual strategies at work in western cinematic treatment of war and occupation in the Middle East, by way of a reading of two award-winning Canadian films, Incendies (2010) and Inch’Allah, (2013). Highlighting the treatment of violence in these texts, I show how their underlying gender/sexual and religio-racial politics link terror to sexuality; desire to innocence; and death to the Muslim body, female and male. In my reading of the visuality of these linkages, I show how a distinct kind of heroic subject, the globally mobile white feminist, becomes coded as innocent of, and vulnerable to, the horrors emanating from the diabolical Muslim body, in the west as in the Middle East, through her engagement with terror.

Citizens and Suspects: Race, Gender, and the making of American Muslim citizenship

AbstractWorking at the intersection of anthropological engagements with cultural citizenship and interdisciplinary scholarship on the racialization of Muslims in the United States, I examine the making and unmaking of American Muslims as both citizens and suspects. Based on my ethnographic research with young Chicago Muslims, I argue that state surveillance and multiculturalism shape U.S. Muslim claims to citizenship as rights and belonging. I chart racialization across different domains to argue that the fetish of Muslim body and behavior can actually render Muslim identity both legible and illegible. It is instances of legibility and illegibility, I argue, that illuminate how race and gender coproduce differential experiences of suspicion for American Muslims, and also different beliefs in the very possibility of, and thus desire for, citizenship. Ultimately, I contend that the experience of the American Muslim indexes the centrality of both race and gender to citizenship in the United States.

Burhan Wani and the Masculinities of the Indian State

Burhan Wani, the ‘pin-up boy’ of Kashmiri separatism was shot dead by Indian Special Forces in July 2016. Wani, a commander for Kashmir-based militant outfit Hizbul Mujahideen, was popular on social media for his advocacy against Indian rule in Kashmir and his calls suggesting violent insurrection against the Indian state. As a Kashmiri Muslim, Wani was doubly marginalised by the dominant Hinduised space of the imagined Indian nation; his reactive masculinity directly challenged the Hindu bravado he encountered in the state-sanctioned hyper-masculinity exemplified by the Indian Armed Forces. The article is inspired by the theoretical contributions of Jasbir Puar and Sudhir Kakar, who argue that the heteronormativity of society is produced through the homosexual and that the Hindu is constituted through the Muslim Other. Furthermore, utilizing Dibyesh Anand’s critical conceptualization of Indian nationalism as ‘porno nationalism’, the article argues that the way the Muslim is constituted is by fetishisation of the Muslim body as ‘hypersexed’, ‘abnormal’ and often criminal. Wani’s masculinity and his public representation constitute a nexus between the technological advancement that enables growing linkages between elements of the global jihad, the emergence of a transnational jihadi culture and him as a role model for young men, whose class and religious identity is superseded by the irredentist claims of the freedom fighter. Refocusing our attention from the superstructures of global masculine posturing to localized, individual experiences of violence, this article aims to reposition Wani, and Muslims, as integral to the masculinities of the Indian State.

Rediscovering Sarkhej: Narrating Belonging in Ahmedabad

This essay addresses the larger context of the postcolonial and neoliberal predicament of visibility for cities in India. It explores the specific instance of Ahmedabad, one of India’s largest cities, in which heritage initiatives conjoined with the city’s spatial history of religious violence has generated a particular syntax of visible belonging. This essay takes up the discourse around the “rediscovery” of Sarkhej Roza, the mausoleum of the Sufi saint Sheikh Ganj Baksh Khattu, and shows that it is embedded in conflicted visibility for Muslims in Ahmedabad. I argue that Sarkhej Roza, located near Juhapura, one of many Muslim ghettos in the city, bears the burden of signifying upon a particular mode of rediscovery that invokes the refashioning of Muslim body and habitat. I ask what is entailed in the contemporary articulations of visibility for the Roza, given the city’s landscape in which bodies and spaces marked by Muslim presence are looked upon with suspicion, if not fear. Therefore, while such “rediscovery” promises the spatial inclusion of these peripheries within the city’s symbolic bounds, the politics of the aesthetic, of urban development and of heritage tourism suggest the matrix of visibility within which the “Muslim” may claim belonging in Ahmedabad.

Reel Accidents

In this paper I focus on the Muslim video compact discs (VCDs) that circulated in wartime Maluku during the religiously inflected conflict that wracked these eastern Indonesian islands in the early 2000s. Characterized by an aesthetics of seriality and repetition, scenes of urban warfare and rampant destruction serve as backdrop for close-ups of the vulnerable Muslim body rent asunder by Christian aggression. Unfolding as repeated rupture across the VCD’s frames, such films visualize the ummah as a body in parts rather than a coherent unity. Of particular concern is the VCD’s mode of interpellation, the aesthetic of accident that violently undermines any narrative framing, and the relation between postnarrative appeal and public making. Within a wider media ecology, Malukan “Muslim Power” murals featuring Sunni and Shia big men from different times and places appear to counter the VCDs’ visions of the ummah in shreds with the strong image of a transnational, transhistorical ummah. Yet such murals also echo the VCDs’ indeterminacy and displays of vulnerability as they also aim to contain them through the defensive lineup of Muslim strongmen. While ethnographically focused on Indonesia, the argument has implications for understanding the appeal of Muslim genres of mediated spectacular violence elsewhere and more broadly.